Ahoy fellow Sailors,

By now, even the luckiest of us to enjoy a really looong Holiday-season, should be back to our every-day chores. Hopefully, you enjoyed pleasantly the holidays and you recharged fully your batteries (Li-ion, right?!).

We surely did so, after a long and cold December, visiting METStrade in Amsterdam to meet in-person some awesome people doing some amazing boat-monitoring systems. Keeping your trips, inventory, tasks and maintenance data in order and your boat in shipshape is great and a good boat-monitoring system comes to compliment this in the best way possible. Not only it will alert you immediately when "funny" things happen (bilge-water level increase, batteries discharged way too much, etc) but will also provide you with a stream of data as historical record that can also assist to identify problems, even before these become critical for the operation of your vessel. If you have never before cared to take a serious look on such a boat-monitoring system, do some research and you'll be amazed about the provided benefits and the down-to earth pricing, which justifies fully the investment. We all know about smart-cars (...thank you Elon!) and we shall soon start hearing more and more about smart-boats. The Internet of Things (IoT) is here, to stay, in all aspects of our lives, including our lovely boats, and we are excited to start during 2024 working towards integrating TheBoatApp with IoT in a unified system where feedback from sensors can be recorded 24/7, prompting you when needed to take action before something becomes critical for safety and surely more cost effective for you to fix before being broken for good.

We also had the pleasure to visit the International Charter Export in Zagreb, again during this cold-December, and had the pleasure to chat extensively with many yacht chartering professionals. One of the hot-topics, you guested it, was boat-monitoring! Professionals need it even more than the "typical" boat-owner, not only to know the location of their dozens of boats, but also the well-being of each one (bilge, batteries, depth, etc). Many already use a simple GPS system to report the boat-location but all agree that a full boat-monitoring system can be the tool to make their lives (and work) easier, lowering risks and making it safer for the charterer and his family.

We also keep working on a boatload of other tasks, to add, update and fix things on both TheBoatApp and TheBoatDB Web versions, as well as the mobile apps. Indicatively, we work on providing:

• User-defined Custom-fields: in each module for you to be able to register and track literally anything YOU want
• Calendar: provide calendar-view visibility of due-dates (alerts)
• Checklists: add Costs, link with Tasks, etc
• Alerts: add a Push Notifications Centre (not just using email notifications)
• Table-views: expand and improve Filtering & Sorting
• …much more!

You may always see what is released in our Changelog and much more you may propose what YOU need, by posting it in our Community, also for other users to be able to comment and vote for it.

Closing, we wish a marvellous 2024 to you and your beloved ones, good health and safe cruising, with an always seaworthy boat!